Quotes About Failure

There are millions of people who BELIEVE themselves doomed to poverty and failure, because of some strange force over which they BELIEVE they have no control. They are the creators of their own misfortunes, because of this negative BELIEF, which is picked up by the subconscious mind, and translated into its physical equivalent.

Building alibis with which to explain away failure is a national pastime. The habit is as old as the human race, and is fatal to success! Why do people cling to their pet alibis? The answer is obvious. They defend their alibis because they create them! A man's alibi is the child of his own imagination. It is human nature.

One of the most common causes of failure is the habit of quitting when one is overtaken by temporary defeat. Every

The person who makes persistence his watch-word, discovers that "Old Man Failure" finally becomes tired, and makes his departure. Failure cannot cope with persistence.

Believe me, it is tough to deal with the social consequences of the appearance of continuous failure. We are social animals; hell is other people.

Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us.

We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness.

Let us say that, in general, failure (and disconfirmation) are more informative than success and confirmation, which is why I claim that negative knowledge is just "more robust.

Too much success is the enemy, too much failure is demoralizing.

My dream—the solution—is that we would have a National Entrepreneur Day, with the following message: Most of you will fail, disrespected, impoverished, but we are grateful for the risks you are taking and the sacrifices you are making for the sake of the economic growth of the planet and pulling others out of poverty. You are at the source of our antifragility. Our nation thanks you.

avoidance of small mistakes makes the large ones more severe.

American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment. America's specialty is to take these small risks for the rest of the world, which explains this country's disproportionate share in innovations.

Every time you use a coffeemaker for your morning cappuccino, you are benefiting from the fragility of the coffeemaking entrepreneur who failed. He failed in order to help put the superior merchandise on your kitchen counter.

Further, being fooled by randomness is that in most circumstances fraught with a high degree of randomness, one cannot really tell if a successful person has skills, or if a person with skills will succeed—but we can pretty much predict the negative, that a person totally devoid of skills will eventually fail.

Writers are remembered for their best work, politicians for their worst mistakes, and businessmen are almost never remembered.

Using, as an excuse, others' failure of common sense is in itself a failure of common sense.

Nicocles, as early as the fourth century B.C., asserts that doctors claimed responsibility for success and blamed failure on nature, or on some external cause. The

In a textbook case of naive empiricism, the author also looked for traits these millionaires had in common and figured out that they shared a taste for risk taking. Clearly risk taking is necessary for large success—but it is also necessary for failure. Had the author done the same study on bankrupt citizens he would certainly have found a predilection for risk taking.

I mentioned earlier that to understand successes and analyze what caused them, we need to study the traits present in failures.

By definition, what works cannot be irrational; about every single person I know who has chronically failed in business shares that mental block, the failure to realize that if something stupid works (and makes money), it cannot be stupid.

We humans are the victims of an asymmetry in the perception of random events. We attribute our successes to our skills, and our failures to external events outside our control, namely to randomness. We feel responsible for the good stuff, but not for the bad.

You attribute your successes to skills, but your failures to randomness. This explains why these scientists attributed their failures to the "ten sigma" rare event, indicative of the thought that they were right but that luck played against them. Why? It is a human heuristic that makes us actually believe so in order not to kill our self-esteem and keep us going against adversity.

In fact, the reason I felt immediately at home in America is precisely because American culture encourages the process of failure, unlike the cultures of Europe and Asia where failure is met with stigma and embarrassment. America's specialty is to take these small risks for the rest of the world, which explains this country's disproportionate share in innovations. Once established, an idea or a product is later "perfected" over there. Volatility

So I end this section with a thought. It is quite perplexing that those from whom we have benefited the most aren't those who have tried to help us (say with "advice") but rather those who have actively tried—but eventually failed—to harm us.